I know what he meant, and he wasn’t being racist, but if you parse his statement in an unfair way that gives him zero benefit of the doubt, which is what you can expect from the media, then yeah, it’s racist. It reminds me of how they parsed PDJT’s joke about maybe the Russians should look into Hillary’s emails as a serious statement. I doubt the Pubbies really think King was being racist but they know they’re not going to win a parsing war when the media controls the airspace, so they’re throwing him under the bus. On the flip side, it also reminds me of the way some of our people unfairly parsed Obama’s “my Muslim faith” line in that interview with Stephanopoulos as him admitting to being a Muslim.
The only thing unfair about it was Stephanopoulos corrected him, in order to hide something from the Republic.